Chris Hani Baragwanath Academic Hospital Photo Daily Maverick Flickr/ Amander Son
Gauteng – The Gauteng health department has denied any medical negligence occurred in the neonatal unit at Johannesburg’s Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital maternity ward between 2020 and 2022. Despite over half of the 1,565 neonatal deaths being linked to “avoidable incidents”.
This isn’t the first time the neonatal unit has come under the spotlight and more must be done to rectify the situation, said Jack Bloom, DA Gauteng Shadow Health MEC. Bloom visited the hospital back in 2017 and not much has changed since then. The hospital was suffering from a lack of staff, broken equipment and CritiCool machines. All issues that haven’t been rectified since then.
“They didn’t discover yesterday that they don’t have adequate cold storage facilities at Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital. It just shows you the poor management that we have there. They should have made sure that they have decent cold supply but they don’t. At the end of the day, those who are suffering are patients.”
There are currently 10 000 people on the operation waiting list but making it to the top doesn’t mean the operation will take place, said Bloom. More often than not, the operation is cancelled because there isn’t clean linen or the generators aren’t working or there is some other issue at play.
Renovations that Chris Hani Hospital needed but never got
In 2017 Bloom declared the hospital should ideally deliver no more than 1‚400 babies a month due to its lack of resources. At the time approximately 1‚900 babies were delivered a month and remained the same. Bloom called for the maternity and neonatal units to be renovated and till today they have not. Surprisingly the budget for renovations was actually returned to the treasury after it went unspent this year.
“R300 million that was meant for hospital renovation was returned to the treasury in the last financial year because they didn’t spend it. What level of incompetence do you have to have when you don’t spend available money and why couldn’t that money be spent on a cold storage facility? You have available budgets. It’s either wasted or it’s not spent at all and returned to the treasury.”
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Changing the situation
Bloom is adamant the issues plaguing the hospital is down to a lack of accountability, poor governance and corruption. The root problem, according to Bloom, is political appointments. There are a number of competent people in the medical field who are pushed aside because they do not have any political affiliations.
“The root of the problem is political appointments or what the ANC calls cadre deployment. At the moment the Acting Head of the Gauteng Health Department is facing corruption allegations. We only have an acting Chief Financial Officer because the previous one is suspended because of corruption allegations. In fact the whole department is full of acting people because disciplinary actions take so long. It’s never the department itself uncovering corruption. We need political accountability.”
One of the more frustrating things for Bloom is the appointment of people who are not fit for their jobs. A Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) between the Gauteng Department of Health and Wits University was signed in 2022. This MOA was a significant step towards bolstering healthcare services in Gauteng but has largely gone ignored. The hopes were that an improved, more structured partnership will iron out some of the operational issues that have dogged the relationship between the two entities.
“This would have been an enormous help in improving governance at Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital and our other academic hospitals that they’ve never implemented. It’s not like there aren’t good people. There are lots of very good people. They just shut out and they shut out because they’re not so part of the corruption network. That’s the only conclusion you can draw at this stage unfortunately.”
For the situation at Chris Hani Hospital, and other hospitals to change, the structure of the hospital must change. Reliable people need to be put in charge and people must be held accountable for their actions. For that to happen, Bloom feels that the governing party must be removed for one that will actually do what needs to be done and save the medical sector.
To hear more from Jack Bloom on Chris Hospital, the issues and changes that need to be made, listen to the podcast here:
